More and more people are expressing and demonstrating their interest in having computers understand them and provide personalized assistance tailored to their specific needs and context. Of course, to provide personalized assistance that is tailored to the specific needs and context of a person, the assisting process must be aware of many aspects of the person, i.e., his or her personal information. Indeed, the more aspects of the person a process knows, the better that process is in personalizing information for the person.
Quite often, the computing device that a person most often has in his or her possession is a mobile computing device, e.g., a smartphone, a tablet computing device, or the so-called “Phablet”—the category of computing devices that are a hybrid of a smartphone and a tablet computing device. Generally speaking, mobile computing devices have less processing capabilities and are operating with limited power resources. While a person may often believe that he/she may have many services and applications running on a desktop computer at one time, in the context of mobile computing devices this is not feasible. As such, the services and apps executing on mobile computing devices must be managed, especially in the context of providing personalized assistance.